Near Saturn
Snowflakes drifted unseen
onto the floor of a lake.
Salts of cyanide fell nearby
in the rainfall over the crags.
Other moons appeared
to the instruments of the eye,
some cratered, one smooth, one of them
spouting water crystals into space.
And we could see odd shapes less
moonlike, Epi-metheus and Pro-metheus
meaning After-thought and Fore-thought
shepherding rocks and ice
in the rings. And others, moonlets,
were invisible, smaller, nameless, most,
like most of what there was and is,
even to the mind’s eye dark.
Lingerie Femme and the Vagaries of Pronunciation
From vagari, Latin, meaning wander,
comes vah-GEHR-ee, an eccentric whim,
or deviation in the fickle mind. Vagaries
are not instances of vagueness, though the new
pronunciation, VAYG-uh-reez, has blurred
the meaning. Let’s not blur the meaning. Aks
for ask was standard during the reign
of Aelfric. If a bigot tells you aks is wrong,
remind him that King Eadgar and Queen
Aelfthryth disagreed. This error is not
trivial, though to err, Pope said, is human,
and he did say uhr, not ehr. To air is what
the British do not do with dirty linen.
Flax, speaking of linen, is the proper sound
in flaccid, which, like accident,
and unlike acid, has two cees. Lingerie
is French for linen. I struggle to accept
(two cees, ak-sept) that in this country
lingerie is lawnjuhray. It’s sad. I love
to mangle French as much as anyone,
and if it made me feel indecent
lawnjuhray would be a triumph,
but it calls to my mind someone
injured in a folding lawn chair.
To Bald Eagle
You were a good workhorse,
gentle for children to ride.
When I leaned forward on your neck
and whispered, I could feel it
that you understood me.
Even in your old age Henry Davis
would have you prance, and he swung down
from the height of your back, easy
out of the saddle when he was eighty.
The mule that shared your stall
for years, Henry told us after he hauled
your body away from the house,
stood screaming over what was left,
for three days. Then, for a few more seasons,
Henry ploughed his cornfield with the mule.
Now, fifty years later, I’m whispering this to myself.
Circa 1961
Titanis walleri
A flightless raven taller than a man
kept chasing me into the ditch along the road.
Nightmare logic made the bird too slow
ever to catch me, but it also made me
stumble. Sea cows, hundreds of miles southeast,
slipped, meanwhile, through clear springs
into the tea-brown tannic brew
of the Lower Santa Fe, a river
famous for disappearing underground
and coming up out of nowhere. There,
in scuba gear, Ben Waller did
palaeoarchaeology for fun. He sank
his bare hands into the silt on bottom
to feel his way along for hidden shapes.
He found whole points of pre-Columbian spears,
and once the fossilized ankle
of the most frightening bird
ever to walk this Earth.
Waller’s job for Civil Defense
was diving to bring back bodies of divers
lost in local caves. The anklebone
he found was what they call
Titanis walleri, a bird the size of the one
in my contemporaneous nightmare.
Two million years before,
that species may have made the laugh
the seriema makes now in Brazil.
The seriema can catch a snake in her beak,
whip it into the ground,
and swallow it whole, head first.
With a similar motion, they say,
Titanis, to protect her chicks,
could bring down cats as big as tigers.
She did this by driving her beak
hook first into the cat’s spine—
head, an eagle’s head more massive
than a battle-ax, swung down
by the muscle-bound neck of an emu
twice the size of my father, who was tall,
and, I should tell you, kind,
but who happened to own the black
totemic carving of a crow
which came to life enormous in my dreams.
Oceanic
1.
Again an oriole has hung her nest
among the cottonwoods just
farther north, and soon
inside the Baltimore hotel
where my grandparents stood
as newlyweds big horseshoe crabs
will scuttle over the lobby floor
while high tide laps
through busted
window frames and doors.
2.
When the north wind came down
out of the cedars
onto the bay
the boat turned slowly
as the needle of a compass
does in the palm of a man
turning to find himself
on a map.
3.
Far down, under a sky without a moon or stars,
when the dive light failed and the current
along the wall of the reef gained force,
he turned to find the lights of the others
gone. Things in the total dark, even
his own hands now, seemed hypothetical,
and deep inside the ear the velocity of his heart.
To Sirius B
Your sister, the Dog Star, was the brightest.
You, the Pup, nobody even saw, until one night
in eighteen sixty-two, when a young man
with a telescope of his own devise looked up,
and there, where the wobble in your sister’s gait
suggested you might be, you were, a white dwarf.
Scientists, when they could read your temperature,
said a thimbleful of you must weigh a ton.
Fusion had to have ceased, they thought,
for you to be so dense. Though white hot
you were defunct at the core, already yellowing,
dead in other words. After the yellow,
they predicted, would come dull red, duller
and duller, until you disappeared. Your sister,
meanwhile, and the Sun would also be white
dwarves. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the Moon,
before that, during the Sun’s red-giant phase,
would have been vaporized in the expanding
sphere and thrown off into nebulous plumes.
A Voter from Mississippi Considers the State Constitution
Article 12, Section 241 on Franchise: Concerning the Exception for Idiots and Insane Persons
Words
ring empty without love,
but we do in the strictest sense
rank idiots below the imbeciles
and imbeciles below the morons.
Idiots we deem unfit to vote.
This is the law. In May of 1954,
soon after Brown vs. Board of Education,
Senator James Eastland in his third term
said that segregation is the law
of nature. It keeps racial harmony,
he said. His people a year later
murdered Emmett Till.
During his fourth term they killed
Evers, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
During his fifth, nearby in Tennessee,
they murdered King. Those deemed
worthy of the vote made Eastland senator
six times. When Eastland was a boy
they made James Vardaman
their governor, then senator.
Vardaman in his first campaign
for governor said education spoiled
good field hands, and he advocated
lynching. Our state constitution
for a time required that voters
demonstrate sound moral character.
That statute was repealed.
A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve
Pigs may be the most intelligent
of the domestic animals,
but next to pigs cats look like
geniuses for diet, caterwauling
sex, longevity, and hygiene.
Sows suffocate their young
by accident, or swallow them
alive on whim. I’ve seen them
puke their breakfast in the dirt
and eat it warm for lunch, their faces
smeared with shit. The poor,
some experts say, are less intelligent
than the rich. This they prove
with numbers from a test
which, I’m just guessing,
is the one they use on pigs.
To Jesse James
Before you were born, your father stood
in the pulpit quoting the gospel:
“As ye would that men should do
to you, do ye also to them
likewise.” He kept five children:
to work as slaves in the hemp fields,
and their mother in the house.
When you were three, he left
for Hangtown Gold Camp
where he found what many young men
found there, cholera and an early death.
Your stepfather beat you, and your mother
replaced him soon with the Doctor,
who worked the children to raise tobacco.
Your brother Frank, having left home
at eighteen, was asleep in the Rebel camp
at dawn, when boys from the Union
crept up through the woods,
and the Battle of Wilson’s Creek
left five hundred dead around him.
In the siege at Lexington he surrendered.
Home on parole he joined a Rebel gang.
Then, you saw jayhawkers hang the Doctor
from a tree in the yard. They swung him
down to ask where Frank had gone,
and when he did not say, they swung him up again.
A year later, Frank came back with Bloody Bill’s gang,
and you joined them at sixteen to murder
the unarmed boys on the train at Centralia.
The Union infantry followed and took a position
with muskets, to pour and pack and fire
as fast as they could, but you and the gang of boys
on horseback charged with two or three revolvers each,
killing a hundred more, including some who surrendered.
You were an outlaw then for life.
You received at your work
two bullet wounds in the chest
and one in the leg.
When you were thirty-four, you, your wife, and children
shared a house with the Ford boys: Robert,
after breakfast, shot you in the back of the head,
having been promised more than he thought
to earn in a lifetime, more, in fact, than he did.
Some say, you were an excellent dancer,
courteous with the ladies. Stories tell
of your saving a widow’s farm.
They mention widows in several states.
I keep trying to see the actual man
behind the eyes in the photograph:
hair and beard cut short, jacket tweed
with a clover lapel, floppy silk bow tie:
a man of moderate style, alert to trouble
such as upholders of slavery met
in the Borderlands of your time.
Frank I see here bald at fifty-five,
big ears, turn-of-the-century three-piece suit
and sweater, wingtip collar and flowing tie,
more shoe salesman by now than robber:
Frank looks less on edge, having killed more
boys and men by far than you did.
When he returned to the farm in old age,
after your mother died, for two bits
he would show the original site of your grave
and let the visitor take a pebble
to keep as a souvenir.
There’s no connection between us, Jesse,
except the enjoyment of lives prepared by those
who made their neighbors slaves under color of law
In the predawn dark while my mother
was giving birth to me, your namesake Jesse,
six when last you saw him at the table for breakfast,
would have been sleeping, an old man
in Los Angeles, in South Central where he lived.
He died there too, the following year, eight miles south
of where my brother Richard lives today.
Love and Empire
Napoleon in exile kept two lockets, one
from the late Marie Walewska
with a snippet of blonde hair, the other
remembering Josephine with violets
he picked beside her grave. As for himself,
he asked that his heart in spirits of wine,
preserved in a dish of silver welded
shut, be given to the second
empress, who survived him.
*
Widowed at thirty, jailed
by Robespierre, made
courtesan by his successor,
Josephine, when she laughed, hid
her ugly teeth behind her hand.
*
Napoleon two days after the wedding left for war.
He said in a letter to his wife, he longed to kiss
her breast, “and lower down, much lower.” Her replies
were cool and few; her dalliances with his rival, not.
*
Sick of his wife’s adulteries, Napoleon in Egypt
saw a woman smiling with good teeth
and sent her husband as envoy to France.
The smiling woman stayed, and with the wives
of other officers she visited the general’s house
for lunch. A parlormaid filling the water glasses
tripped and drenched the woman’s dress.
Napoleon, as though surprised, leapt up,
and led his guest into a private room where,
he insisted, she could “repair the damage.”
*
Marie Walewska, faithful as a wife
at twenty-one, according to her own
account, had spurned Napoleon.
But when he smashed his watch,
and swore that he would shatter
Poland, thus, were she not his,
she fainted, wakening after the rape
to find him soothing her, as if in love.
*
Men who saw bells fat as oxen
drop through bell towers in flames
after a month lay scattered, windblown
in a thousand fields of snow.
*
Marie Walewska spent two nights in Napoleon’s bed
on Elba, planning to stay, but he escorted her
on the third night halfway back to the boat.
In the locket she had inscribed: “Remember,
when you cease to love me, that I love you still.”
*
The perfume of the violet is sweet, though brief
because it numbs the nerve it touches.
*
Declining the gift of the dead man’s heart,
the second empress wrote to a friend:
“He did not treat me ill, as some
suppose. I would have wished him
many years of a contented life,
if only he lived them far away from me.”
From Anyte of Tegea
For you, goddess of war and wisdom,
I leave this cherrywood pike
three times the length of my body.
I have wiped from the iron leaf
the blood of men
whose lives I ended.
Soon my name and the names
of victorious kings
and kingdoms will be nothing.
Still, in the light of your
mind, goddess, may
the brave soul glimmer.
The Cormorant at Snooks Pond
After the mall tycoon paid experts to conclude
that rainbow trout can survive in water like this,
warm and rich from a wetlands, three years
after they drained the pond, and excavators